Human beings, when not deranged by ideology, do in fact find their purpose in and through a community that sees itself as holy.
Every premodern society was grounded in a sacred law that insisted, as Strauss explains, that “not everything is permitted.” (This sacred community could well be, by the way, a polity deriving its authority from “the laws of nature and nature’s god.”) It is the confrontation with these divine codes, which define all premodern regimes, that first made political philosophy possible. Strauss famously referred to this as “the theological-political problem.”
Modern liberalism’s attempt to create the rational state repudiated all such holy laws as superstition. Methodological science, it was presumed, would bring universal enlightenment and a global order of liberal democracies. But this conceit, as Strauss showed, has instead given us the nihilistic rage of the hollow self. To reverse this condition—to escape from the cave beneath the cave—it is not enough simply to wish for, or even work toward, a revival of Christianity. Virtually every Christian institution today operates within the horizon of modern liberalism; it preaches “humanitarian morality.” What is necessary, Strauss suggested in a famous response to Carl Schmitt, is to escape that horizon and undertake a “radical critique of liberalism.”
Glenn Ellmers, The New Criterion, June 2024.
The soul of Strauss | The New Criterion
On Leo Strauss & the crisis of modern liberalism.
